The wind screaming across the high steel girders of the Mapo Bridge carried the distant, frantic wails of civilian sectors being purged by the military's automated defense protocols. Down below, the dark, oily waters of the Han River slapped against the concrete pylons, reflecting the bruised, necrotic crimson of a sky that had forgotten how to be blue.
Min-jae sat cross-legged on a narrow, two-inch-wide iron beam at the very peak of the bridge’s suspension tower. He was completely exposed to the elents, his bare chest glistening with that dense, translucent jade sheen that made his skin look less like human tissue and more like polished, mineralized stone.
The two surviving snipers had long since fled, their panicked boot-heels echoing into the dark maze of the northern district. Min-jae hadn't spared them another thought. His entire universe had contracted down to a single, microscopic point sitting exactly three inches beneath his navel.
[The 'Solid-State Axis' has reached thermal equilibrium.]
[Your 'True Ki' pool is actively vibrating against the physical walls of your ridians.]
[Warning: Transitioning to the 'Realm of True Ki Circulation' requires the manual ignition of the Twelve Primary Pathways. Failure to maintain structural alignnt will result in total internal rupture.]
"Ignition," Min-jae murmured, a faint wisp of white, pressurized vapor escaping his lips.
In his first life, he had overheard a captured elder from the displaced Mount Hua Sect describing the agonizing transition from a martial novice to a true expert. The elder had compared a mortal's energy pathways to clogged, dried-up riverbeds. They were filled with the stagnant silt of modern impurities, sedentary habits, and—worst of all—the invisible, greasy residue of atmospheric mana. To force True Ki to circulate, one couldn't just gently push it. You had to light it on fire. You had to use the internal energy like a pressurized blast-torch, burning through the blockages until the pathways themselves vitrified, turning into smooth, hardened conduits of liquid gold.
If his [Jade Bone] frawork wasn't perfectly aligned, the sheer volutric pressure of the ignition would cause his limbs to explode from the inside out like over-inflated tires.
"Let's begin," Min-jae said, his voice dropping into a register so low it caused the massive steel cable beside his shoulder to thrum in sympathetic resonance.
Thump.
With a sudden, violent contraction of his lower abdon, Min-jae did not just breathe; he locked his lungs in a vice-like grip, executing the Primordial Core rhythm at triple its standard compression rate.
Inside his solar plexus, the solid-state golden pebble—his Core Seed—abruptly stopped its smooth rotation. It reversed direction.
SCREEECH—!
A silent, agonizing shriek echoed directly within his brain as the microscopic golden sphere began to grind against his central ridian junction. The 53 units of highly concentrated, liquid True Ki he had harvested from his previous battles were suddenly forced into a hyper-compressed, spinning ring. The friction generated an internal heat that transcended anything he had experienced in the departnt store basent.
Min-jae’s skin turned from a pale jade to a deep, incandescent scarlet. The air within three feet of his body began to warp and ripple from the sheer thermal backwash, the gray soot coating the iron beam beneath him instantly vaporizing into clean, white smoke.
[Warning! Internal Temperature: 58.4°C and rising rapidly!]
[Your 'Iron Skin' is experiencing severe internal delamination stress!]
[The system detects foreign mana sedint blocking the 'Hand Greater Yin' Lung Channel.]
"Burn it," Min-jae snarled through teeth clenched so tightly they began to fuse.
He didn't rely on a system command. Using the absolute, unyielding leverage of his [Jade Bone] spine, he drove his internal focus downward, acting as a massive hydraulic piston that smashed the compressed ring of True Ki straight into the first primary pathway.
BOOOM.
A muffled, concussive explosion rattled inside his chest cavity. Min-jae’s head snapped back, his eyes flying open as two solid, blinding beams of pure golden light erupted from his pupils, cutting through the purple river mist like twin searchlights.
The golden force had hit the first blockage. The synthetic mana sedint—the invisible digital data that the World Tree System had seeded into every human vessel to make them compatible with magic—resisted. It flickered with a pale blue, digital light, trying to form a system barrier to protect its paraters.
But True Ki wasn't a parater. It was the absolute, physical manifestation of mortal life force and willpower.
The gold crushed the blue. The liquid fla of his internal energy bored through the obstruction with a sound like tearing tal, stripping the digital sedint away and incinerating it into nothingness. The True Ki flooded the cleared channel, running down his shoulder, splitting at his elbow, and settling directly into the tips of his fingers.
[The 'Hand Greater Yin' Lung Channel has been successfully ignited!]
[Your physical reaction speed has been decoupled from the standard Epoch ti-matrix.]
Min-jae didn't stop to appreciate the sensation. The montum of the first breakthrough was already fading, the liquid gold threatening to backflow and drown his heart if he didn't clear the next line.
"Again!" he roared internally.
He slamd the piston down a second ti. Then a third. A fourth.
For twenty agonizing minutes, Min-jae sat suspended between the sky and the river, his body twitching rhythmically as he systematically detonated the internal blockages along his major pathways. The Hand Yang Brightness Large Intestine Channel. The Foot Yang Brightness Stomach Channel. The Foot Greater Yin Spleen Channel.
With every single breakthrough, a thick, foul-slling black tar was violently forced out of his pores—the chemical preservatives of modern food, the microplastics of modern water, and the digital code of the universal interface, all being aggressively purged by the unyielding logic of the pure martial path. The tar instantly dried and peeled away from his skin, turning into fine grey ash that drifted down into the Han River below.
When the twelfth and final pathway—the Foot Lesser Yin Kidney Channel—was violently breached, the twelve separate streams of golden energy did not settle. They connected. They ford a continuous, closed-loop circuit that began to sprint through his anatomy at a speed that generated a literal magnetic hum around his body.
Vruuuuuummmmm—
Min-jae let out a long, shuddering breath, a dense pillar of white steam shooting ten feet from his mouth before dissipating into the midnight air.
The incandescent scarlet hue of his skin receded, replaced by a complexion that looked entirely flawless—not like stone or tal anymore, but like rare, living ivory that possessed an internal, self-contained brilliance. His musculature hadn't grown larger, but the lines were so sharply defined, so geotrically perfect, that he looked like a statue carved by a master artist who understood the exact mathematics of physical force.
He checked his golden status interface.
[System Milestone Achieved: The True Circuit.]
[You have successfully entered the 'Realm of True Ki Circulation (Stage 1): ridian Ignition'.]
[Your physical vessel has been completely erased from the World Tree Network's baseline tracking ledger.]
[Attributes Updated:]
Strength: 50 - 75 (Surpasses low-tier Boss entity density)
Agility: 55 - 80 (Movent speed approaches localized sonic threshold)
Constitution: 60 - 85 (Physical layer immune to C-Rank elental degradation)
Perception: 35 - 50
True Ki: 53 / 200 - 10 / 200 (Expenditure during ignition stabilized; recovery rate multiplied by 400%)
Min-jae slowly rose to his feet on the narrow suspension beam. He didn't look down at the three-hundred-foot drop into the river; the concept of height had lost its psychological aning. With his Perception now sitting at 50, the sensory data entering his mind was entirely multi-dinsional. He didn't just see the city; he felt the rhythmic, tectonic vibrations of the sub-surface layout. He heard the electrical current humming inside the distant corporate defense grids of Gangnam.
And he heard sothing else.
From the northern district—the direction of his [Martial Sanctuary] on Mount Naksan—a massive, rhythmic pulsing of high-density mana data was erupting. It wasn't a gate opening. It was a mobilization signature.
Dozens of high-speed armored personnel carriers and three military transport helicopters were currently surrounding the base of the hill, their searchlights cutting through the terraced alleys of Ihwa-dong. The Miracle Guild and the state council had finally lost their patience. They had realized that Choi Sung-min’s administrative delay was nothing more than a cover, and they were moving to seize the geographic void before the rogue variable could fortify it further.
Min-jae look toward the mountain, his golden-ringed pupils narrowing into two sharp, cold needles of absolute intent.
"You corporate dogs really have terrible timing," Min-jae whispered, his voice carrying that newly forged tallic resonance that caused the suspension wires of the Mapo Bridge to ring like harps. "I just cleared my lines, and you've already brought your entire vanguard to act as the firewood."
[Active Skill Initiated: 'Formless Step'.]
BOOOOOOM!
The peak of the massive iron suspension tower didn't just crack; it violently sheared down the middle, a ten-foot section of the structural steel turning into a spray of shrapnel as Min-jae launched himself northward, his body breaking the sound barrier with a sharp, concussive crack that rattled the windows of the city for three miles around.
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